Yesterday was an odd day. First, this whole government-shutdown thing made me angrier than I anticipated being. Oh, I anticipated being angry, but not to the personal level I am. One of our very own Winter's Tale readers, who holds an important position at the National Archives (you know, the place the where the United States keeps the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and such), is apparently nonessential, so she spent the day organizing the hangers in her closet. Sure, if one defines nonessential as "not involved in actually keeping people alive," then the guardians of American history are nonessential. But.

Then I found out that the husband and father of two of our other Winter's Tale readers was accosted by cops because he was seen walking around a cemetery peeling an apple with a knife. He happens to be a minister, but his hair is just a little bit long. The local dumbness of this event combines with the national dumbness of the other: "This is not [to quote my former toddler] making me happier!"

Plus, Ruckus spent the day at the vet getting neutered, which was not making him happier either. But on the flip side: suddenly it seems as if a publisher might actually (hold your breath) have taken a constructive interest in my rereading manuscript (let your breath out now). Yes, everyone's heard that story before. Still, hope is like an irrepressible cat who's just been fixed and now feels fine and can't understand why I won't let him go outside and prowl around and kill stuff so he sits very, very close to the crack in the door and yowls suggestively in case I'm so Congress-level dumb that I haven't noticed that he wants to go outside, and as we all know, Congress-level dumb is so dumb that even though a million people are already excitedly trying to sign up for health care, idiotic elected officials keep harumphing, "Obamacare is a failure because the website is overloaded," and, like, you are so stupid that you are, like, making me screech and squeal like I'm fourteen years old and my mother won't let me get a tattoo. Argh.